Video card letters

[CP5670]

What do the MX, XT, GT, SE and so on that appear in video card names mean? Do the companies just pick two random letters that supposedly sound cool or are these letters actually acronyms for something?

Just something I have wondered about for a while now.

 

[Schadenfroh]

see my buyer's guide

it has an explanation of each

 

[CP5670]

I know where the cards with these names generally fall but I mean the letters themselves. Does XT for example stand for something?

 

[carlosd]

The cards with XT in nvidia are the crappy ones with the half of the memory bandwidt, but in the ATI side are the ones with the best performance.

SE cards in the ATI side are the crappy ones with the half of the memory badwith. The same for nvidia.

GT in nvidia are very good performance cards, they have all the high end features, but with lower clock GPU and memory speeds.

MX was only used to designate the low performance cards on the Geforce 2 and Geforce 4 families. Those cards had completely different GPU's from the high end ones like the Titanium series.

 

[klah]

There were a few acronyms in the past that actually had official meaning such as GTS(Giga-Texel Shader), but none of the current have any significance beyond simply being model designators.

A few could stand for common acronyms such as SE(special edition), LE(light edition), XT(eXtended technology). I always thought MX was chosen in honor of James Maxwell. Can't think of anything computer related for GT, so that probably came from the marketing department.